Pachauri’s travails were prominent in an excellent Times feature story.

Pachauri’s recent travails have included the failure of the vaunted IPCC WG2 peer review process to correct a claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 2035.

The glacier claim proved to be based on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund pamphlet, which in turn was based on a 1999 New Scientist interview with Indian scientist Syed Hasnain (see his joint interview with Richard North).

Pachauri blamed WG2 co-chairs, Martin Parry (now of the Grantham Institute) and Osvaldo Canziani for failing to pick up the error.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s former co-chairs, British scientist Dr Martin Parry and Argentine meteorologist Dr Osvaldo Canziani.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the co-chairs. Of course, the chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation,” Dr Pachauri said.

“Frankly, it was a stupid error. But no one brought it to my attention,” he added.

High Noon sponsored a conference in New Delhi, India on May 13 and 14, 2009 (see here).
A keynote presentation entitled the “Road to High Noon” included the following graphic (also linked in Anthony’s article) as authority for the claim that “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate”

The EU High Noon webpage also relied on the WWF article directly, citing it as authority as follows:

Future decline in glacier runoff will affect both mountain villages as small glaciers disappear and the four – five hundred million inhabitants of the entire Ganga basin as spring and autumn flows in particular decline, at differing timescales. Reviews from the region suggest that the timescales are short, may be the 2040s (World Wildlife Fund 2005) or the 2050s (Xu Jianchu and others 2007), although monsoon precipitation in the Indian and Nepal Himalaya appears to stave off glacier reduction in the central and eastern Himalaya by comparison with the Karakoram in the west (Rees & Collins 2006)….

Climate change will be another factor adding to the stress (WWF, 2005).

So IPCC is not the only organization using WWF pamphlets as authority.
EU High Noon did as well.

Nor were the IPCC WG2 reviewers the only climate scientists to overlook the lack of support for these particular IPCC assertions. The High Noon conference had a lengthy list of presentations (online here) and, in a quick survey, none of the presentations appears to have taken issue with IPCC claims.

In resisting calls for his resignation, Pachauri denied that TERI benefited financially from the inadequate due diligence:

Pachauri also dismissed speculation that the think tank he heads in India – The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) had benefited from the alarmist statement that Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035. “TERI is not involved in this mistake,” Pachauri said.

On May 19, 2009, the European Union announced a $4.5 million (3 million euro) project to study retreat of Himalaya glaciers, with TERI being one of the institutions.

The EU has earmarked 3 million Euros (approximately INR 19.5 crores) for this 3 years project, bringing together leading research institutions in Europe: Netherlands, UK and Switzerland, and India: TERI, IIT-Delhi & Kharagpur. The participation of Japan in this project is adding an international dimension.

TERI also recently announced participation in a glacier program involving Iceland and Ohio State. Representing TERI in the project was Syed Hasnain … the source of the original 2035 claim. The Ohio State representatives were not named (Lonnie Thompson is the director of the Byrd Center.)

Update: Looking back to December blogs (I recall noticing this at the time, but was otherwise occupied here), it seems that the story of IPCC problems was first raised on Dec 1, 2009 in a guest post at Pielke Sr here , crediting Graham Cogley for spotting the problem.

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Great summary. But presumably S. McIntyre is to blame, for not spotting the issue before the IPCC’s 4th Report was published. The ‘2000 world’s leading scientists’ who we’ve heard so often completely endorsed it obviously having better things to do.

He’s such a noble man, our Patchygate. When there’s a Nobelprize to collect he’s standing at the front, but when there are grave mistakes to answer for it’s somebody elses fault. Good leaders say: “The Buck Stops Here”.

EU taxpayers are shelling out $14MM to support studies of glaciers based on nothing, with Pachuri honing in on a share of it, in conjunction with the chap who invented the non-fact.
Maybe Euro-voters should ask about this gem before their next trip to the polls?

“Too many people easily spotted this” — this statment is a two-edged sword.

In retrospect, the IPCC effort must have been pretty shoddy. Maybe many thougtful people considered the whole thing a silly eco-government-train-wreck, not worth their while.

Now that the forces of skepticism have decided to rally more vigorously, and thanks to FOIA and leaks of invaluable emails, it is becoming popular to point out what now seem obvious absurdities. The topic of Global Warming affords a target rich environment.

The are some Team emails (Jan 02-Jan 05, 2007) discussing a figure from the “grey literature” ( in this case for High School teachers) included in the first IPCC report. Phil suggests they run to realclimate first with a publication later. Very similar to the way the Himalayan debacle occurred.

Science, (vol 326, 13 Nov,,pp. 924-25) had a two-page news article on the Himalayan incident based on a new study, ‘The Raina Report’ mentioned in some of Steve Mc’s refs, that gave IPCC some fits. In it, Shroder of U. Neb. says “they got it ‘horribly wrong’. Also, glacier melting is said to contribute to 3% to 4% of Ganges flow. Most is from monsoons. Booker summarizes the incident.

Murari Lal, coord. lead author, 2007 IPCC/Asia “Rejects the notion that IPCC was off the mark…but he acknowledges the report’s 10-author team relied on unpublished work…”

From economictimes.indiatimes.com, “Last November, Mr Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to minister of state for environment Jairam Ramesh for his support to a study which doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.”

Shouldn’t Pauchari be blaming Lal instead of Parry and Canziani? His claim is that Parry and Canziani don’t work for IPCC so he can’t punish them.

Briefly, since TERI is mentioned, although this is not Himalayan related. TERI used to be Tata Energy… with a fairly recent name change. Lots of news regarding Redcar UK, Tata, Teri.

Please see link provided by DD Freund below. It seems to show an unattributed source of much of the IPCC text. The only bit they did not copy was 2350 and a clear statement that melting would take 200 to 300 years.

The HIGHNOON page Steve linked contains some interesting presentations. I flipped through several, and most appear to take no position on when the glaciers will melt, but what will happen when they melt. It’s the same thing I would do if my boss sent me out to give a pitch on something highly speculative. Good old CYA.

There is one from Gwyn Rees of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK. She ends her pitch with “Unlikely that all glaciers will vanish by 2035!” It is the only one I’ve seen that might be construed as calling BS. Wonder if she was invited back?

It is the same as spin about ice caps melting. IPCC estimates thousands of years for melting even under worst case. Then people take “when it melts” scenarios of sea level rise and proclaim imminent disaster, ignoring the thousands of years caveat.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

from fakeSteveJobs blog (’07)http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/12/al-gore-meets-klingon-ambassador.html
“Well it was a momentous occasion as Al was lauded by the United Federation of Planets for his work to save planet Earth. He’s shown here with the Klingon ambassador, Lord Koloth. (The V-shaped green emblem is the mark of his rank.) They’re both holding menus from the dinner. Later Al was beamed aboard the Klingon mothership for a tour. He says it was absolutely fantastic, and he swears there were no rectal probes. “Well,” I said, “none that you remember. They give you drugs that erase your memory. Ask Woz. They did it to him back in the Eighties, only they overdid the memory drugs and now he can’t remember anything. He goes around telling people he invented the friggin personal computer. Anyway it was the same ploy. They gave him some big award for tech innnovation, and took him up to the mothership. Honestly, I can’t believe you fell for it. It’s like the oldest alien trick there is.”
So Al gets all freaked out and wants to see a doctor. I told him not to bother since our primitive technology won’t be able to detect anything. “They probably put a chip in you too, but you’ll never find that either,” I said. That put him in a panic …”

“As a result, many researchers now believe it is time for a change at the IPCC, a point backed by Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia…a much lighter touch needs to be taken, argue critics like Hulme.”

Earlier, I get the impression that Hulme was pretty distant from ‘that old thing’ from the last century.

Wasn’t Hulme the first to say “almost on a par with holocaust denial”.

I originally posted this comment at TAV. I normally would not repeat one of my sermons, but in this case I feel very strongly about this subject matter and its implications – at least for me.

Jeff ID, I think the bigger point to be made here is that the IPCC has used some rather mysterious probability ratings for predicting/forecasting climate events that will occur in the future (and all detrimental events – being what the IPCC is). They wanted to put some very subjective probability ratings into something that would appear to be more objective and objectively determined.

I wrote to the IPCC and asked for how certain groups determined these ratings. The IPCC ’s published directives allow the groups flexibility in how they go about determining these ratings but they say that the methods should be available and documented. I never received a reply nor did any other people making this request that I am aware.

The whole consensus thing rests heavily on these ratings that IPCC groups put out by claiming that the ratings are seriously persued by the “experts” in the field. Here we have evidence that that could not have been the case and that a group of “experts” put a 90% or greater probability on the forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 and without any understanding of the “peer reviewed” sources that were being (mis)used.

What I would like see coming out of this is the IPCC revealing the documentation that they have for all the groups probability ratings and how it was determined. I would not like to see the matter side tracked by who profits or who does not. Those probability ratings and how they were arrived at is more important in my view.

I completely agree. If the IPCC does not do as you say, then the IPCC will lose any credibility they have left, if any. Anyone who then uses the IPCC as a reference will be laughed at. Any politician who uses the IPCC as a reference from now on risks being looked upon as a fool.

This was one of the first things that set off my (professional) BS meter when reading summaries (for policy makers) of the IPCC reports. The use of numeric values which are not derived in any mathematical fashion and are attributed as probabilities of future events was a misrepresentation intended to create an aura of scientific credibility to self-assessments of the strength of the personal beliefs of IPCC authors.

The fact that the values have no scientific basis (exactly how does a 50% probability assessment differ from a 67% one or a 90% from a 95%?) is not stressed in these reports and the results are then accepted as truths by the general public (and by some climate scientists who have posted comments on this web site).

Very well said. ‘Follow the money’ is fine (and is bound to happen) but we must not neglect to establish exactly how the IPCC itself was corrupted, to the great detriment of science, both in reality and now in the public mind (a process we are only seeing the start of at this moment).

These “expert” confidence ratings are what was used to sell the AR4 recommendations to the governments of the world.

So yes, getting a clear explanation of how they were derived is very important. The only explanation I can see is the AR4 authors were asked how they “felt”.

As a scientist I have been absolutely appalled that such a system of ratings was ever taken seriously. If I used such a system to make a case for or against a project I would be laughed out of my profession.

The IPCC has only one option now, remove the immediately implicated and claim it’s an isolated incident even though it’s clearly not one person involved. If they go further they would have to put in farce controls b/c the science doesn’t support the disaster scenario’s they need to keep funding rolling.

Kenneth, as far as i can tell, these probability ratings are “negotiated” by the scientists and also even by the policy makers in the summary for policy makers. I think more care is taken with the probabilities in the WG I report than the WG II report. However, a concern that i have raised many times is that “expert judgement” is used too early in the assessment, and scientific uncertainty analysis receives short shrift.

There are actually two fundamental flaws in the IPCC projection. The first is the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 which has now been confirmed as erroneous. The second, and more critical flaw, is that even if the glaciers disappeared, it would not have affected the water supplies of hundreds of millions of people. Glaciers form only a very small percentage of the catchment area of the Ganges Basin. Furthermore glaciers do not add water to the river system (except when their mass balance is declining due to melt.) Glaciers store water in the cold season and release it in the spring and summer. This storage effect would only be noticeable in flows in the immediate downstream area so, for example, hydropower projects in the headwater catchment areas would be affected by the absence of glaciers. Summer flows would reduce.

However, because the glaciers form such a small proportion of the total Ganges Basin, absence of the glaciers would not significantly affect flows in the lower reaches of the river. Low flows in large river basins are sustained primarily from groundwater discharge and groundwater is recharged from precipitation. As the IPCC models predict increasing precipitation in the eastern Himalayas, the IPCC should have concluded that there would be increased water flows in Himalayan rivers with climate change, not less.

The article shows that “2035” was an accidental or intentional metathesis from “2305”, and that the erroneous rate of glacier recession was due to an uncaught and moronic subtraction error by the distinguished scientists.

Thanks — this 12/22/09 story by ng (aka John N-G) on the atmo.sphere page of the Chronicle’s website shows that in 1999 VM Koltyakov put forward the year 2350 (not 2305!) as the likely date when 80% of the extrapolar glaciation would have melted, and that this may have been the source of the 2050 number.

The 2350 number is therefore not just web-propagated disinformation as P. Solar initially suggested above. P. Solar subsequently referred to your link, but did not make it clear that he was thereby withdrawing his charge.

This does not mean that Himalayan glaciers have not receeded, just not at the wacky rate stated by the IPCC. The real retreat according to Indian satellite data is about 20% over the last 40 years. Here is the Ref:

I did see this… where I live (a city called Pune in India), Prannoy Roy’s considered a respected journalist. I second the sentiments of the poster here, I couldn’t believe the kind of gentle eliciting of comments (I wouldn’t dignify what he did by calling it “questioning) from Mr.IPCC … but the truth will out, is what I believe :).

I first came across the science part of this story through the post Himalayan Glaciers Not Melting by Doug Hoffman on The Resilient Earth blog on 13 Nov 2009, quoting from a report by Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India. I see from Jimchip (Jan 23 19:48) that Science covered the story the same day. Did anyone pick it up before that? I have some memory that WUWT did but I can’t find that link.

Pachauri’s public statements are full of similar wild prognostications.

For example, he recently claimed that “In Africa, by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to water stress due to climate change”. [http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/rkp-statement-unccs-09.pdf]

In the same speech he suggests that the world may warm more than 7 degrees from 1900 to 2100. Here he takes the top end of the confidence interval for the highest emissions scenario (6.4 degrees warming from 1980-99 to 2090-99) and adds it to 1906-2005 warming (0.74 degrees). Leaving aside the unreliability of the models and the fact that concentrations (especially methane) are not even keeping up with the mid-range of the scenarios, Pachauri forgets that his two periods overlap and that the IPCC has claimed 0.3 degrees warming during this overlap (1990-2005) – so that the total no longer reaches 7 degrees. [http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html]

The same speech prefigures other disasters. Greenland glaciers may be eliminated, giving 7 metre sea level rise. Rain-fed agricultural yields could fall 50% in the next 10 years. Pachauri even knows what climate change will wreak politically: “My own analysis suggests that at least 12 countries are likely to tend towards becoming failed states and communities in several other states would show potential for serious conflict due to scarcity of food, water stress and soil degradation.” Move over, Nostradamus!

Pachauri says: In Africa, by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to water stress due to climate change, and in some countries yields from rainfed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%.”

This comes from the IPCC WGII chapter on Africa which says: “In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003).” http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch9s9-4-4.html

Agoumi turns out to be a paper Professor Ali Agoumi issued by a lobby group, the International Institute for Sustainable Development. It simply says:

“Studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown the following risks, which are linked to climate change:
• greater erosion, leading to widespread soil degradation;
• deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000–2020 period”.

Prof. Agoumi gives no further information as to which studies he means, but he may just be referring back to his earlier portrayal of current agricultural conditions: “There is strong soil erosion with extensive soil degradation. Decreasing rain-based agricultural yields with grain yields reduced by up to 50 per cent in periods of drought.”

So it appears Prof. Agoumi really just meant that yields tend to drop by 50% when there’s a drought and that studies suggest there might be more droughts due to climate change.

Summary: Pachauri’s recent claim of an imminent potential 50% reduction in yields from rain-fed African agriculture comes from misrepresenting an IPCC WGII suggestion that itself is based on an un-peer reviewed paper which quotes unnamed studies that may themselves only reflect the existing fact that North African crop yields drop by 50% in drought years.

I’m really enjoying the “there’s no science behind this, but we stand behind the conclusion” aspect of this. It’s a slight shift from the normal “the error in our work doesn’t change our conclusions” stance. I’m watching to see what the time constants are for finding and correcting (as opposed to whitewashing) obvious errors in IPCC reports as well as finding errors in and correcting underlying research papers. 3 years and counting on the obvious ones, a decade or more and still counting on the peer reviewed literature.

If you believe the IPCC report, the glaciers will melt before the report is corrected with 90% probability.

Interesting how the British press, the Australian press, even the English-language Indian press are all over this. In fact the IPCC is being engulfed in successive waves of scandals- but the US MSM are handling it like John Edwards’ baby: not a peep.

I would like to nominate this winter as a climate-scare tipping point. I detect an acceleration in the rate of revelations of really stinky stuff. As it accelerates, some of it is even easy for the press to grasp, especially this glacier-gate case.

Looking back to December blogs (I recall noticing this at the time, but was otherwise occupied here), it seems that the story of IPCC problems was first raised on Dec 1, 2009 in a guest post at Pielke Sr here , crediting Graham Cogley for spotting the problem.

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[…] » Over at Climate Audit, my new most favorite place for a good laugh, and head shake, McI has another post about the Himalaya 2035 IPCC AR4 mistake. One might think, given the coverage on his blog, that he’s … […]